ALTHRMODHRN

Altermodern was thefirst in aseries of fourone-day events. thePrologues, preceding theTate Triennial exhibition.With contributionsfrom prominent writers.art historians, artistsand philosophers. eachPrologue comprisedlectures. performances.films and discussionsattempting to introduceand provoke dehate aroundthe Triennial's themes.

The first Prologueopened the debate withthe proposition thatthe period defined bypostmodernism has cometo an end and what canbe called 'altermodernity'has taken its place. Artmade in the times we livein belongs to the globalera. and is conceived aridproduced~

~and nationalism. The art~yartists'cross-border. cross-culturalnegotiations; a new real andvirtual mobility; the surfingof different disciplines;the use offiction as anexpression of autonomy.

SATURDAY 28 APRIL 2008

TATH BRITAIN

14:00

MILLBANK HNTRANCH

NAVIN

RAWANCHAIKUL

Navins ofBollywood

14:00 and 15.15

AUDITORIUM

STEPHANE GOXE

andJORDI VIDAL

Servitude and Simulacra

16:00

GALLHRY62

TRIS VONNA-MICHELL

Auto Tracking:From Cellar to Garret

16:30

AUDITORIUM

OKWUI ENWEZOR

chairedbyJ.J. CHARLESWORTH

Specious Modernity:Speculations on the EndofPostcolonial Utopia

MODERNITY AND POSTCOLONIAL AMBIVALENCEOkwui ENWEZOR

FROM GRAND MODERNITYTO PETIT MODERNITY

THERE IS A DUAL NARRATIVE that is often taken to becharacteristic of modernity: the first is the idea of itsunique Europeanness, and the second is its translat­abilityinto non-European cultures. This narrative ar­gues for the mutability of modernity, thus permit­ting its export and enhancing its universal characterwhile putting a European epistemological stampon its subsequent reception. The travelling charac­ter of this dimension of modernity as export under­stands modernity as emerging from Europe, say fromthe mid-fifteenth century, and slowly spreading out­ward like a million points of light into the patchesof darkness that lie outside its foundational centre.Modernity in this guise was projected as an instru­ment ofprogress. The guiding concepts often associ­ated with it - instrumental rationali , the develoJ>­men of a' 'sm - emerge 10 the debate e eentheological and scientiJic [ca on, and provided thcfoundation for the period of European Renaissanceand Enlightenment, in which two structures of pow­er and domination that marked the Middle Ages ­feudalism and theological absolutism - collapsed.Scientific rationality and individual property thatformed the basis of capital accumulation were trium­phant. This colla e shift d the ~cales-of sovereignpower from the heolo' I toth~

The chief principles of secularism - individualliber­ty, political sovereignty, democratic forms of govern­ance, capitalism, etc. - defined its universal charac­ter and furnished its master narrative. Thus emergedthe rightness of the European model, not only for itsdiverse societies, but also for other societies and civ­ilisations across the rest of the world. Most impor­tantly, the export ofEuropean modernity became notonly a justification for, but a principal part of globalimperialism. Among serious critics, the master nar­rative made the claims of universality susceptible toepistemological and historical distortion when de­ployed in the service of European imperialism. Thereis good reason for the criticism. Some historians onthe right, such as Niall Ferguson, have argued thatmodern European imperialism, specifically that of

the British Empire, was actually a good thing, not tobe regrl;ltted, as it bestowed a semblance ofmoderni­ty on those privileged enough to have been recipientsof the E pire's civiHsing zeal.· So on the one handthere iso grand 10dernlty i its Europl;lan mani­festation . reason an progr S • and on the otheris what could be called petit .odernlty, which rep­re cnts the export kinb rt of quotation, whichsome would go so far as to designate a mimic moder­nity through its various European references.

It is this relation between grand and petit modernitythat has contributed to the widespread search for fa­cilities of modernity that represent what the IndianMarxist historian Dipesh Chakrabartywould call mo­dernity's heterotemporal history.2 Chakrabarty ar­gues that the various scenes of modernity observedfrom the point of view of a heterotemporal composi­tion of history reveals the extent to which experienc­es of modernity are shot through with the particular­ities of each given locale, therefore deregulating anyidea of one dominant universalism of historical ex­perience. Such experiences, he argues, are structuredwithin specific epistemological conditions that takeaccount of diverse modes of social identity and dis­course. ;Ihroughout the twentieth century, all acrossthe world, diverse cultural contexts made adaptingor translating modernity into specific local variantsa pathway towards modernisation, by acquiring theaccoutrements of a modern society. Because of co­lonial experience this resulted in what could be re­ferred to as grand modernity writ small in cultures- Chakrabarty's case study was India - perceived tobe in historical transition from colonialism to post­colonialism. In comparing different types of moder­nity, and in our attempts to describe their differentcharacteristics we are constantly confronted with thepersistent tension between grand modernity and pet­it modernity. How can this tension be resolved? Andhow can the fundamental historical experiences andthe particularities of locale that attend them be rec­onciled or even compared? It strikes me that all re­cent attempts to make sense of modernity and bendit toward the multiple situated petit modernities -

,again Chakrabarty would have called these 'provinci­alities' - are premised on finding a way to render thedivergent experiences and uses of modernity, namely

THE BAZAAR ORWORLD'S FAIR

OF MODERNISATION

I HAVE WITNESSED and mar­velled at the breathtakingspeed and scale of the mod­ernisation occurring in bothcountries. Of course, theeconomies ofthese two coun­tries - along with their mod-ernisation, both in depth andin breadth - pale in compar­

ison to Japan's, the immediate East Asian referencethat lies equidistant to its two newly modernisingneighbours. Both China and South Koreas financialstrengths derive from a massive export economy.China, of course, is known as the factory of the world,a designation made possible by the fact that its facto­ries are disproportionately the production centres ofcheap global consumer goods that have transformedthe 'Made in China brand into a ubiquitous logo ofglobal commerce. South Koreas industrial power,on the other hand, is characterised by a focus on ad­vanced technology and heavy industry. Each of thesetwo countries has buHt up its infrastructure through

spaces, museums and art fairs all are making theirway to Beijing and Shanghai.ln China alone, the rest­less imagination and ambition shaping the landscapeof contemporary art is breathtaking. Along with thisshift, especially among intellectuals and artists, a re­verse phenomenon of migration is occurring, name­ly the relocation back to an Asian context from whichmany of them had emigrated years before. Yet it isnot only the infrastructures of the state and privatespeculation that are being revived, but the artisticand intellectual cultures of many cities are also being

remapped. New centres aredefinitely emerging, but rath­er than cultural and intellec­tual capital being concen­trated in a limited numberof cities, it is being dispersedin many cities as the reversemigration of ideas continuesto explode and expand thecultural parameters of newChina and South Korea.

OKWUI ENWEZOR [BELOW] responding to NICOLAS

BOURRIAun's [TOP] definition of the new 'modern': 'altermodern',The session was chaired by London-based writer, curator and aristJ.J. CHARLESWORTH.

FORMS OF TRANSFORMATION:MODERNITY AS META-LANGUAGE

In fact, over the course of the last sixteen months,3 Ihave had occasion to travel repeatedly to South Koreaand China. On numerous trips, as part ofmy researchwork as a curator, this situation of urban transfor­mation and social renewal was visible everywhere.Underscoring the experiences ofthese trips is an ob­servation of the scale of growth of the contempo­rary art world: artists, galleries, collectors, exhibition

the necessity to historicise and ground them in tradi­tions ofthought and practice.

To HISTORICISE MODERNITY is not only to ground itwithin the conditions of socia!, political and econom­ic life, it is also to recognise it as a meta-Ianguagewith which cultural systems become codified andgain modern legitimation.The idea of modernity as ameta-Ianguage has been par­ticularly acute for me over thepast year. To travel in Chinaand South Korea recently isto encounter this meta-Ian­guage in action and in manyguises. All around cities likeSeoul, Busan, Shanghai,Beijing, Chengdu, Hangzhou,Guangzhou, Hong Kong andTaipei, etc., the clatler of ma­chinery erecting impressiveinfrastructures sounded likethe drill ofthe Morse code typ­ing out the meta-Ianguage ofmodernisation. These struc­tures - from museums, operahouses and theatres to stadi­ums, sporting centres, high­speed train lines, airports,stock exchanges, shoppingmalls and luxury apartments- bring alive to our very eyesbrand new urban conditionsand cultural spheres that were not remotely imagi­nable a generation ago. The cities of East Asia havebecome the playground of global architects enjoyingthe patronage ofboth public and private developers.

IN HIS LECTURE AND SUBSEQUENT ESSAY, ENWEZOR drew on works

such as THOMAS HIR8CHORN'S Bataille Monument 2002 [TOP] and

[BELOW] GUY TILLIM'S Congo Series (this work showing supportersof]ean-Pierre Bemba on their way to a rally in Kinshasa, July 2006).

THE ALTERMODERNAND HABITATIONS OFCONTEMPORARY ART

IF THE CURRENT SPATE of modernisation in Chinaeffectively lays waste to heritage and historical glo­ry and instead emphasises contingency, might it notbe reasonable to argue for the non-universal nature

pagoda. This hybridisation may appear absurd to usnow, until we remember that, not too long ago, post­modern architecture in the West was busily invent­ing these trumped-up styles of the classical and themodern based on a similarly invented autochthonousWestern past. Like latter-day biennales, Chinesecities are theatres of the grand statement, a lot ofwhich have no other purpose than to impress and in­spire awe. This has been achieved by what some haveargued as indiscriminate modernisation and urban­isation schemes that have erased much of the cul­

tural heritage of old China,sweeping out and destroyingmany old neighbourhoodsand putting in their place un­remarkable architecture.4

Chinese bureaucrats, urbanplanners and developers, likelatter-day Baron Hausmanns,are simply unsympathet­ic to any idea that cities likeBeijing need to be histori-cised, that is to say museu­mified. Modernity is a con­tinuous project. Its principalfeatures, they may reason,are at best contingent. By thisconjecture, I want to seek outwhat is currently at play inthe relations of discourse inwhich the particularities orprovincialities - I take this tomean the conditions and sit­uations that generate them- of modernity are situatedthrough the practice, produc­tion, dissemination and re-ception of contemporary art,

far from any claims to a grand heritage or an arriviste,mimic petit translation.

Yet ancient cities like Beijing and Hangzhou - in acountry that possesses a very old civilisation and so­ciety - in contrast feel nothing like museums. Wherevestiges of the past exist, they tend to be peripheralrather than central to modern Chinese cities. Thesecities, if anything, could be likened to temporary ex­hibitions of city-making, a succession of dizzying ob­solescence; a bazaar or world's fair of modernisation.The cities' skylines are full of glass boxes crownedwith the pitched green roofs of the classical Chinese

The ongoing, large-scale process of modernisation inChina and South Korea underscores part of the en­ergy, excitement and senseof newness coursing throughthe various strata of eachcountry, making them con­temporary emblems of anew modernity. Travelling inEurope, on the other hand,conveys no such sense of en­ergy, excitement or new­ness. Europe, on the con­trary, feeIs old and dour inits majestic petrification. Infact, many European citiesfeelless like part of our time.With their miles of imperi­ous ceremonial architectureand in the quaintness of thenarrow, tourist-friendly, cob­ble-stoned streets, walkingthrough these cities feels likebeing in a museum of moder­nity. The museumificationof Europe is in fact the in­tention: the display of herit­age, historical glory and deadpast. Preservationists of thisheritage and glory play therole of morticians of modernity.

the combination ofgrand and petit modernity, bring­ing together successful models from both East andWest. That is, they are both undergoing modernisa­tion based on the acquisition of instruments and in­stitutions ofWestern modernity - I mean this in a su­perficial sense - within a relatively short span oftime,yet without the wholesale discarding of local valuesthat modify the importations.

of modernity as such? This certainly would be truewhen applied to contemporary art. We are constant­ly entertained and exercised in equal measure by thenotion that there is no red line running from modern­ism to contemporary art. For the pedagogues of theexistence ofsuch lineage, the chiefemblem ofthis un­broken narrative can be found in the attention givento the procedures and ideas ofthe Western historicalavant-gardes by contemporary artists. On the otherhand, I take the view of this claim, pace Chakrabarty,as a provincial account of the complexity of contem­porary art. To understand its variousvectors, we need then to provincial­ise modernism. There is no one line­age of modernism or, for that mat­ter, of contemporary art. Looking foran equivalent of an Andy Warhol inMao's China is to be seriously blindto the fact that China of the Pop artera had neither a consumer soci­ety nor a capitalist strueture, twothings that were instrumentalised inWarhol's critique and usage of its im­ages. In that sense, Pop art would beanathema to the revolutionary pro­gram - and, one might even claim,to the avant-garde imagination ­of such aperiod in China that coin­eides with the condition and situation that fosteredWarhol's analytical exeavation ofAmerican mass me­dia and consumer culture. But the absence ofPop artin China in the 1960s is not the same as the absenceof'progressive' contemporary Chinese art during thatperiod, even if such contemporary art may have beensubdued by the aggressive destruction of the CulturalRevolution.

If we are to make sense of contemporary art duringthis period in China and the United States, then wehave to wield the heterotemporal tools of history­writing; in so doing, we will see how differently situ­ated American and Chinese artists were at this time.Despite the importance of globalisation in mediatingthe recent accounts of contemporary art - a world inwhich artists like Huang Yong Ping, Zhang Huan, XuBing, Matthew Barney,Andreas GurskyandJeffKoons,for instance, are contemporaries - we can apply thesame mode of argument against any uniform or uni­focal view of artistic praetice today. When HuangYong Ping, in the work A History ofChinese Painting

and a Concise History ofModern Painting washed ina Washing Machinefor Two Minutes 1987 (Walker ArtCentre, Minneapolis: below centre), washed two arthistorical texts - the first by Wang Bomin and the lat­ter, one of the first books of Western art history pub­lished in China, Herbert Read's A Concise History ofModern Painting - in a washing machine, the resultis a mound ofpulped ideology, a history ofhybridisa­tion rather than universalism.5 Ifwe apply the samelens, say, to the work of Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerianartist working in London, we will again see how he

has made the tension between his­tories, narratives, and the mytholo­gies of modernity, identity and sub­jectivity important ingredients inhis continuous attempts to decon­struct the invention of an Africantradition by imperialism. The locusof Shonibare's theatrical and some­times treacly installations is the fic­tion of thc Afriean fabric he employs.These fabries and their busy patternsand vivid colours are often taken tobe an authentie symbol of an Africanpast. But they are in fact, products ofcolonial economic transactions thatmoved from Indonesia to the facto­ries of England and Netherlands, to

the markets ofWest, East and Central Africa, and ul­timately to Brixton. These artists inhabit what couldbe called the provincialities of modernity and haveincisively traced diverse paths of modernity throughthem. By examining these clifferent locales of prac­tice, as well as the historical experiences that informthem, we learn a lot more about the contingent con­ditions of modernity than about its universalism.Here again, Chakrabarty offers a useful framework inthis regard by dint ofwhat he refers to as 'habitationsof modernity:6

What could these habitations of modernity be? Onwhat maps do they appear? And in what forms andshapes? The search for the habitations of modernityseems to me the crux of the 'altermodern' , the sub­ject of the 2009 Tate Triennial exhibition and the ac­companying discursive projects organised by NicolasBourriaud, its curator. In his outline to the altermod­ern project, Bourriaud lays out an intellectual andcultural itinerary, a jagged map of simultaneity anddiseontinuity; overlapping narratives and contigu-

ot

a

TRIS VONNA·MICHELL uses the tradition of storytelling to makeenergetic performances that take the audience on amental and physi­cal journey. His narratives, both fictional and non-fictionaL. explore theways history is passed on. Auto-Tracking: From Cellar to Garret wasa new performance piece, conducted in six aets (each lasting approx.7 mins). It reworked previous narratives exploring nations of personaland historical spaces and monuments. which arc embodied, fobricatedoe 80ught for. The spoken-word monologue interwove past and currentverbal scripts. performed between interludes of audio field-recordings.

ous sites of production that form the basis of con­temporary art practice globally. The chief claim ofthealtermodern project is simple: to discover the cur­rent habitations of contemporary practice. Thus thealtermodern proposes the rejection of rigid struc­tures put in place by a stubborn and implacable mo­dernity and the modernist ideal of artistic autono­my. In the same way, it manifests a rebellion againstthe systematisation of artistic production based ona singular, universalised conception of artistic para­digms. If there is anything that marks the path of thealtermodern, it would be theprovincialities of contempo­rary art practice today - thatis, the degree to which thesepractices, however globalisedthey may appear, are also in­formed by specific epistemo­logical models and aesthet­ic conditions. Within thisscheme, Bourriaud sets out toexmaine for us the unfoldingof the diverse fields of con­temporary art practice thathave been unsettled by globallinks. But, more importantly,these practices are measuredagainst the totalising princi­pIes ofgrand modernity.

At the core of the altermodern's jagged map is itsdescription of what its author refers to in his intro­ductory paper as the 'offshore' location of contem­porary art practice.7 However, I will foreground thelocation of these contemporary practices as indica­tive of a drive toward an off-centre principle, name­ly the multifocal, multilocal, heterotemporal and dis­persed structures around which contemporary artis often organised and convened. This multiply 10­cated off-centre - which might not be analogous toBourriaud's notion of offshore-based production ­is not the same as the logic of decentred locations.Rather, the off-centre is structured by the simultane­ous existence of multiple centres. In this way, ratherthan being the decentring of the universal, or the re­location of the centre of contemporary art, as the no­tion of the offshore suggests, it becomes instead, theemergence of multiplicity, the breakdown of cultur­al or locational hierarchies, the absence of a singularlocus or a limited number of centres.

TOWARD THE EXCENTRIC:POSTCOLONIALITY, POSTMODERNITY

AND THE ALTERMODERN

Ta A LARGE EXTENT, the discursive feature of thealtermodern project seems to me areturn to earlierdebates that shaped postcolonial and postmodern­ist critiques of modernity and the aesthetic princi­pIe of the universal. At the same time, they launchedan attack on modernism's focus on a unifocal ratherthan dialogic modernity. Embracing these critiques,

Bourriaud's project sets outto explore the excentric8 anddialogic nature of art today,including its scattered trajec­tories and multiple temporal­ities, by questioning and pro­vincialising the idea of thecentre, by decentring its im­aginary, as Chakrabarty pos­its in his provocative bookProvincializing Europe. 9 Yetthis excentric dimension ofmodern and contemporaryart is not necessarily a rejec­tion of modernity and mod­ernism; rather it articulatesthe shift to off-centre struc­tures of production and dis-semination; the dispersal of

the universal, the refusal of the monolithic, a rebel­lion against monoculturalism. In this way, what thealtermodern proposes is a rephrasing of prior argu­ments. The objective is to propose a new terminolo­gy, one that could succinctly capture both the emer­gence of multiple cultural fields as they overspill intodiverse arenas of thinking and practice, and a recon­ceptualisation of the structures of legitimation thatfollow in their wake. In his text, Bourriaud makesconcrete what he sees as the field of the altermodern,describing his model as

an attempt to redefine modernity in theera of globalisation. Astate of mind morethan a 'movement', the altermodern goesagainst cultural standardisation and mas­sification on one hand, against national­isms and cultural relativism on the other,by positioning itselfwithin the world cul­tural gaps, putting translation, wander-

ing and culture-crossings at the centre ofart production. Offshore-based, it formsclusters and archipelagos of thoughtagainst the continental 'mainstream': thealtermodern artist produces links be­tween signs far away from each other, ex­plores the past and the present to createoriginal paths.

Envisioning time as a multiplicity ratherthan as a linear progress, the altermod­ern artist considers the past as a territo­ry to explore, and navigates throughouthistory as weil as ail the planetary timezones. Altermodern is heterochronical.Formally speaking, altermodern art priv­ileges processes and dynamic forms tounidimensional single objects, trajecto­ries to static masses.1O

THE OFFSHORE, OFF-CENTREAND PROCEDURES OF RELATION

THE FORMULATION of the altermodern reflects pre­cisely Eduoard Glissant's theory of the 'poetics of re­lation;ll an idea predicated on linkages and networksof relations rather than on a singular focal point ofpractice. Bourriaud's idea of the altermodern ad­dresses the cultural geography of relations of dis­course and practice. He rightly reads contemporaryart as that which always exceeds the borders of spa­tial confinement, beyond the limited geography ofthe nation and its totalised identity. The altermodernis structured around trajectories, connections, timezones: heterochronical pathways. Such relations sug­gest that the project is strongly in accord with a largecorpus of scholarship and literature that has madeconceiving an alternate system for evaluating mo­dernity, one in which the off-centre contexts of con­temporary art are a core inteilectual principle. Buthave not the practices of art always been predicatedon trajectories and detours, on dynamic forms andmodes of production and dissemination? Is the roleof contemporary art not always the constant refus­al of orthodoxy; to display attentive vigilance againstclosure; to challenge ail doctrinaire, unitary discours­es on which some ofthe most powerful theses ofclas­sical modernism rest?

While Bourriaud identifies the shift in recent art asthe desire to mobilise new localities of production,which he perceives today as proper to the field of ar­tistic practice, a related field ofhistorical research (asI have noted several times) has been examining thedimension of the off-centre principle of art-historicaldiscourse for some time. The result of these researchprojects is slowly entering mainstream art-historicalproduction. In the last decade, several scholars haveexplored the structure ofthe heterochronical (think,for instance, of Chakrabarty's notion of the heter­otemporal method of organising historical frames)conception ofmodern and contemporary art history.

One such project is arecent exhibition, Turns inTropics: Artist-Curator, developed for the 7th (}wangjuBiennale by the Manila-based Filipino art historianand curator Patrick Flores. In his exhibition project,he proposes an agenda of experimental and concep­tualist practices from the late 1960s to early 1980s inSoutheast Asia by four artists working in contextsin which the spirit of modernity was not only trans­forming the splintered identity ofthe nation, but rap­id modernisation was also recalibrating the canonsand languages of artistic practice."· Flores's emphasisoflocation represents a distinct cultural ecology, as itwere, a habitation ofmodernity. His research exploresnot only the shifts in the language of artistic moder­nity - between the traditional and the experimental,from academic painting to conceptualism - it also in­terrogates the effects and receptions of modernity bythese postcolonial artists in relation to their belong­ing to the nation.

In doing so, he directs attention to a text stencilled ona sculpture by the Malaysian artist Redza Piyadasa,which states that i\rtworks never exist in time, theyhave "entry points:"<3 In this text Piyadasa's sculpturedeclares the contingency of its Own history. In fact,it historicises its Own ambivalence towards canoni­cal epistemology. What the stencilled text seems tobe questioning is the idea of art as a universal signthat is a frozen historical datum. Instead, artworksare dynamic forces that seek out relations of dis­course, map new topologies, and create multiple re­lations and pathways. Piyadasa's statement antic­ipates and echoes Bourriaud's Own suggestion foraltermodernist art, both in its claim for the trajec­tories of art, but also in the shifting historical andtemporal dimension of the apprehension of such art.

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While none of the four artists whose works were ex­amined in the exhibition have appeared in standard,so-called mainstream surveys and accounts of ex­perimental art and conceptualism of the late 1960sto the present, new off-centre historical researchsuch as Flores's consistently drives us to the har­bours of these archipelagos of modernity and con­temporary art. The work of Ray Albano from thePhilippines, Jim Supangkat from Indonesia, Piyadasaand the younger Thai artist, curator and art histori­an Apinan Poshyananda, have clear structural affini­ties with the work of their contemporaries practicingin the West. Yet their work - made with an awarenessof, and in response to, specific historical conditions- shares similar objectives with the work of otherpostcolonial artists from different parts of the world,including those living and practicing in Europe.

These objectives would be familiar to emerging schol­ars such as Sunanda Sanyal, whose research focuseson modernism in Uganda;'4 Elizabeth Harney, whohas written extensively about negritude and modern­ism in Senegal;'5 or the magisterial writing on mod­ern and contemporary Indian art by the eminentcritic Geeta Kapur.'6 Art historian Gao Minglu has en­gaged equally rigorously with contemporary Chineseart, and with the same objective!7 In a sirnilar veinof historical archaeology, the Princeton art historianChika Okeke-Agulu has studied and written persua­sively on the generative character of young modernNigerian artists in the late 1950S during the periodof decolonisation.18 But by no means am I suggest­ing that many of the artists examined in these vari­ous research studies are obscure in their own artis­tic contexts. Their artistic trajectories belong exactlyin the heterotemporal frames of historical reflectionand the chronicles of their art are part of the hetero­chronical criticism and curating that has been partofthe discourse oftwentieth- and twenty-first-centu­ry modernity. However, viewed with the lens of a uni­vocal modernist history, one that is predicated on theprimacy of centres of practice - what Bourriaud re­fers to as the 'continental "mainstream''' - can thesepractices be understood as forming more than an ar­chipelago, and in fact exceed the altermodernist im­pulse? They certainly do expand the purely modernistnotion of artistic competence. These issues are at thecore of recent writings and research by the British­Ghanaian art historian and cultural critic KobenaMercer, who explores the diverse off-centre contexts

of late modernism and contemporary art in aseriesof anthologies focused on artistic practices and art­ists in Africa, Asia and Europe!9 Similar issues weremapped in the seminal 1989 exhibition, The OtherStory, a project curated by the Pakistan-born Britishartist and critic, Rasheed Araeen at the HaywardGallery, wherein he examined the contributions ofhitherto unrecognised non-western modernist art­ists to European modernism.20

These surveys and situations of off-centredness areemblematic of the large historical gaps which today,in the era of globalisation, need to be reconciled withdominant paradigms of artistic discourse. In seekingto historicise these contexts of production and prac­tice, a dialogic system of evaluation is established. Itresolutely veers away from the standard and receivednotions of modernity, especially in the hierarchicalsegmentations that have been the prevailing point ofentry into its review of off-centre practices.

MODERNITY, POSTCOLONIALITYAND SOVEREIGN SUBJECTIVITY

WHATEVER THE ENTRY POINT for the altermodernartists, there remain some boundaries between thelocations of contemporary artistic practice and thehistorical production of modern subjectivity. Theseboundaries are tied up with the unfinished natureof the project of modernity. Consequently, I wantto examine in more detail some ideas of moderni­ty that could be related to the way hierarchies oper­ate in the recognition and historicisation of artistsand their locations of practice. The course I will fol­low could be likened to navigating the different lev­els and segments ofgrand and petit modernity, albeitwith degrees of separation designating stages of de­velopment, movements, breaks in culturallogics, os­sification of epistemological models, and transitionsto which we ascribe the norms of the modern world.One logic of modernity to which the altermodern re­sponds is globalisation, aseries of processes synony­mous with the emergence of a worldwide system ofcapitalism. We could understand this modernity, inits teleological unfolding, as part ofthe current man­ifestation of globalisation as a force-field ofwinners,near winners and losers. (The losers being, obvious­Iy, those thoroughly subordinated and utterly disen­franchised by modernity's centuries-Iong progression

from the worlds of indenture, slavery, imperialismand colonialism, to the aggressive, retributive wars ofrecent memory.)

This field of retributive conduct has at its disposal theoverwhelming capacity to erase and deracinate sub­jectivities that inhabit the cultural localities of petitmodernity. This makes the large claims ascribed togrand modernity less an avatar of enlightened cultur­al and material transformation, and more a structurewith a dark core. It seems fairly impossible to thinkof modernity without linking it to concepts such assovereignty, equality and liberty as they have been de­veloped across domains of life and social practices.Pace Michel Foucault's theory ofbiopower,21 a rangeofthinkers have focused on this dimension ofmoder­nity, aspace in which the master and slave dialectic iswrit large. This dialectic, developed by Hegel, dissoci­ates sovereignty from the practice of self-governance,and instead embeds it in the interrogation ofthe rela­tions between power and subordination.

However, subordination is directly linked to howpower exposes the subordinated to structures of vio­lence, to acts ofhistorical erasure. In this area of anal­ysis, Giorgio Agamben's extension ofbiopower and bi­opolitics was an attempt to sketch out the conditionsaround which what he calls naked life is summoned:astate ofliving in which individual sovereignty is ex­posed to its most basic, barest dimension, to execu­tion.22 In terms of ideas surrounding modernity andcolonialism, this thinking has been singularly ilJu­minating, and has been taken up by other thinkers.The feminist literary scholar ]udith Butler, for exam­pIe, in arecent reflection on the prosecution ofthe waron terror and the hopelessness of prisoners caughtin its principal non-place, Guantanamo Bay, ad­dressed the issue of naked life in the essay 'PrecariousLife:23

Pushing further the frontier of this thinking is thepowerful writing of theorist Achille Mbembe, es­pecially in an essay in which he summarises the di­mensions ofbiopower, bare and precarious life as thezone of necropolitics. In the essay Mbembe exploredthe fundamental relationship between modernityand violence, particularly in the apparatuses of thecolonial regime, such that 'To exercise sovereignty isto exercise control over mortality and to define lifeas the deployment and manifestation ofpower:24 For

Mbembe, necropolitics is the condition under whichconducts related to sovereignty - as he amply dem­onstrates by citing the policy of apartheid in SouthAfrica or the predicament of the Palestinians in theoccupied territories - are inextricably bound up withexercises of control over existence, of individuallivesand their narratives. Most examinations of the artis­tic work coming out ofSouth Africa during the apart­heid era confirms how artists were overwhelminglypreoccupied with the structures of violence and itsdirect manifestation as part of the condition of co­lonial modernity and thereby establishes art as oneexploration of the question of sovereignty. Here, re­sistance to violence and the rigorous assertion of sov­ereign subjectivity becomes in itself the subject andnarrative of art and cultural production.

Facing away from culture, Mbembe in his critique, forexample, sees political theory as tending to associatesovereignty with issues of autonomy, be it that of thestate or ofthe individual. He argues however, that

The romance of sovereignty, in this case,rests on the belief that the subject is themaster and the controlling author of hisor her own meaning. Sovereignty is there­fore defined as a twofold process of seif­institution and seif-limitation (fixing one'sown limits for oneself). The exercise ofsovereignty, in turn, consists in socie­ty's capacity for self-creation through re­course to institutions inspired by specificsocial and imaginary significations.25

To distinguish this relation of seif-institution and seif­limitation, the central concern he notes targets in­stead 'those figures of sovereignty whose centralproject is not the struggle for autonomy but the gen­eralised instrumentalisation 0/ human existence andthe material destruction 0/ human bodies and popu­lations:26 Two of Mbembe's historical examples areSouth Africa and Palestine. In the fate of these twospaces, he identifies the fundamental rationality ofmodernity, arguing, 'that modernity was at the originofmultiple concepts of sovereignty - and therefore ofthe biopoliticaI:27 Artworks such as those by WilliamKentridge, in films such as Ubu Teils the Truth 1997,

and Paul Stopforth, in his 1980 drawing series Death0/Steve Biko, to name only two instances from SouthAfrica; and by Emily]acir in her exhibition Where We

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Ei'RENCH PHILOSOPH ER JORDI VIDAL'S Servitude and Simulacra, co­directed with STEPHANE GOXE was screened at tbe AltermodernPrologue. It is at once a filmic essay about contemporary thought, acurated exhibition commentated by its author. and a supplement tohis book of the same title. VIDAL has produced poLemlcal statementsagainst postmodernism and its reduction of modernism's promlse ofsociaL equality and justice.

Gerne From 2003, dealing with the emotions of sep­aration, conf1nement, banislul1cnl and exile experi­enced by PaJestinians - alt form part of the artisticresponses to the concepts of overeignty and the bi­opolitical.

It strikes me that the idea of the altermodern, as itdeviates from the limits placed on life and subjeetivi­Ly by the instrumental violenee ofmodernity, Call1lOt

be captured by focusing alonc on shirts in IoeaJes oepractice or by strategics of resistanee against domi­nation. 1hc altermodern is tobc fOtlud in thc work of art it­self; the work ofarl as a mani­festation ofpure diffcrcnce inall the social, cultural and po­litical signs it wields to elab­orate that difference. It is thespace in which to fulfil theradical gesture 01' refusal anddisobedience, not in the for­mal sense, but in the ethicaland epistemological sense.Such a stance - what I take tobe altermodern - with differ­ence writ large as the funda­mental quest 01' the object 01'art, can be identified in suchdiverse works as the installa-tions 01' Thomas Hirschhorn, the radiant paintings 01'Chris üfili, the splayed anatomies ofMarlene Dumas,the paintings on animal sacrifice as a metaphor forhuman suffering by Iba Ndiaye, the 2008 film Hungerby Steve McQueen and many more.

FOUR MODERNITIES

IN NAVIGATING the different segments 01' moderni­ty, one could weIl imagine the different levels 01' itsdevelopment or in the hierarchicallayers 01' its con­struction, as the zones 01' differing concepts 01' lifeand death, subject and non-subject, as the sites01' the biopolitical, as the scenes 01' struggle 01' sover­eignty, as domains 01' exception. Here I am employingthe segments metaphorically to situate the hier­archies 01' modernity, and in so doing to catch itsover-spill into domains 01' everyday practice, crucial­lyart.

Considering this over-spill, and following the schema01' the hierarchies 01' modernity, especially as it bearson cultural and artistic practice, I want to concep­tualise what I see as the four domains 01' modernity.The first three domains lays out the architecture forthinking the link between differing zones 01' life and,indirectly, cultural practice. The fourth and last issceptical 01' attributes ofmodernity as such. It is obvi­ous that when the concept 01' modernity is broachedin recent scholarship, the defining characteristic isoverwhelmingly skewed toward the idea 01' one sin­

gle modernity, that being theidea that modernity is essen­tially a project fundamental­ly connected to the develop­ment 01' Western capitalismand imperialism. FredricJameson's book, A SingularModernity,28 partly suggeststhis. In fact, he was brutallysceptical 01' recent attemptsto expand the definitions 01'modernity into such thingsas 'alternative modernity',l\frican modernity', 'subal­tern modernity' or other suchdesignations. To him moder-nity is inextricably bound tocapitalism, and globalisation

is its current and main feature. But by perceiving allother modernities as flowing from this one single,grand narrative as the fount 01' historical develop­ment, what emerges is a narrower, unifocal, mono­cultural and less heterochronical perspective 01' mo­dernity.

However, new debates have been historicising thediscourses 01' modernity in other to propose a moreheterogeneous, multifocal, polycentric, broader in­terpretation 01' categories 01' modernity. Many 01' therecent scholarship do insist that there has never beena single modernity but multiple modernities, as S.N.Eisenstadt has argued.29 The economist and philos­opher Amartya Sen also applies a multifocal inter­pretation 01' modernity as he lays out and describesthe changing modalities 01' modernity based on abroad view ofthe human community and identity.30

Björn Wittrock develops a comparative analysis 01'early modernity, examining particularly the dimen­sions ofthe public sphere in the Indian subcontinent,

Europe, China andJapan.31 The FrenchAnnales histo­rian, Fernand BraudeI, also argues for the diachroniedimension of modernity as a long process of slow ev­olution in which there are no linear, unidirection­al flows of time. Rather than a singular causality, heplaces a strong emphasis on the study of micro­systems and events - on trade and cultural exchang­es among competing interests in the Mediterranean,for example - that provide a more complex, but over­arching world picture.3" In the context of twenti­eth-century globalisation, Arjun Appadurai arguesfor a modernity seen and experienced predominant­Iy through a scalar analysis of mediated exchangestelegraphed by representations such as images,sound, technology and ideas.33 The philosopherKwame Appiah has recently examined modernitythrough the lens of cosmopolitanism,34 a view thatappears to be in accord with some ofthe objectives ofthe altermodern conception of contemporary art.

There are four categories that I identify as emblemat­ie of the conditions of modernity today: supermoder­nity, andromodemity, speciousmodemityand aftermo­dernity. For the sake of our focus on visual modernity,my categories may simplify the point. But they willnonetheless serve as points of entry for the photo­graphie images I will reference later.

A.SUPERA10DERNITY

THE FIRST CATEGORY postulates the essential formsof modernity through the general character andforms it has taken in European and western culture.This category ofmodernity emerges directly from thegrand narrative of modernity. lt is the zone of whatI call supermodernity, to borrow Mare Auge's term.Supermodernityrepresents the idea ofthe 'centre'. It isa domain ofpower, and is often understood as greatlyevolved, or highly 'advancea or 'developea.lt is gen­erally acknowledged as fundamental to the develop­ment of the entire framework of global modernity,namely the world system ofcapitalism. Therefore, it isfoundational to all other subsequent claims and dis­courses of modernity. All of them follow in the wakeof supermodernity. The main coordinates of supermo­demity, as developed through the Enlightenment, aremarked by notions such as Jreedom, progress, ration­ality and empiricism.lt is through these ideas that theconcepts of sovereignty and autonomy emerge.

To understand the nature of the next two catego­ries of modernity requires paying close attention tothe four coordinates exemplified in supermodernity,because they are the framing devices that allow usto describe whether a cultural sphere is pre-modern,modern or anti-modern, insofar as it concerns theworld of modernity that we have inherited since theages of discovery and imperialism. Supermodernity isdeeply embedded in structures of power and has atits disposal superior and formidable infrastructuresof force to continuously maintain and advance itsagenda. More importantly, it tends to represent ourview ofmodernity in relation to cultural positions andpolitical contexts that may subscribe to the idea ofmodernity for whieh Bourriaud has gone search­ing for new possible artistic imaginaries that devi­ate from or may even blaspheme against its suppo­sitions. For six centuries, supermodernity has beenstubbornly resilient and has remained the example towhich other modernities respond. This is the moder­nity that is well-captured in Mbembe's necropolitics,because of its capacity to standardise zones of livingand practiee.

B. ANDR0A10DERNITY

THIS BRINGS US to the next category of modernity,its second level. If supermodernity understands andclaims for itself the sole category of the developedand advanced, we can designate the next level, which- because of historieal circumstances - is imaginedas not to have evolved to the same tertiary degree, asdeveloping modernity.lt is not difficult to guess whiehsegments ofthe global order occupythis circle ofmo­dernity. Specifically, developing modernity today re­fers to broad swaths of Asia, especially China, India,South Korea, etc. In a true sense, this circle of moder­nity is caught in a cycle that I designate as andromo­dernity, meaning that it is a hybrid form of moder­nity, achieved through a kind of accelerated type ofdevelopment, while also devising alternative mod­els of development. Andromodemity, as such, is alesser modernity since its principal emphasis is de­velopment or modernisation, as JÜTgen Habermaswould have it.35 Because it is still modernising, an­dromodernity has neither the global structure ofpow­er nor the infrastructure of economic, technologieal,political and epistemological force to promulgate itsown agenda independent of the systems (museums,markets, academies) of supermodemity. lt therefore

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lacks, for the moment, the capacity for world dom­inance. Moreover, much of its development is seento be based principally on the affective elements ofmodernity, that is they are deeply embedded in theprocess of modernisation; in the way things appearto be modern (hence the obsession with acquiringtbe accoutrements of a modern society, even if so­cially, there are distinctive differences between vari­ous zones oflife.)

C. SPECIOUSMODERNITY

THIS BRINGS US to the next circle, which relates tothe state of Islamic modernity today, especially intbe present state of rebellion into which it is plunged.According to some detractors of the rise of politicalIslam and the extremist strains that have emergedout of tbe radicalisation of politics in Muslim so­cieties, the problem of this rebellion is essentiallyone of modernity, the idea that these societies havenever been modernised. One reason given for thisstate of affairs within Islam is the lack of democraticparticipation, which encoutllges and, in fact, fomentsauthoritarian rule by either the clergy in theocrat­ic Iran or the absolute monarchies in the Arabianpeninsula or dictatorships such as Saddam Hussein'sIraq and Bashar al-Assad's Syria. The absence ofdem­ocratic participation, the argument goes, makesit impossible to bring into existence modernisingforces that would bring about modernity. Wben it ispointed out that countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran,Lebanon and Turkey, have each undergone periods ofradical secularisation throughout the twentieth cen­tury, such instances are often dismissed as superfi­cial attempts at modernisation; therefore what theyleft in their wake is a kind of speciousmodernity. Onthe inverse, the long process of reform taking placewithin Muslim societies today is just as often labelIedas a nihilistie, anti-modern movement. Whether spe­cious or not, anti-modern or not, it is neverthelessthe case that Muslim societies are radiealised, andwithin that radiealisation lies the seed of a biopo­litical gesture that is a response to the programs ofcolonial modernity. Politieal Islam is thus not aconsequence of a speciousmodernity that neverassimilated into its structures an authentie moder­nity based on the four rationalities of supermoderni­ty, but part of a postcolonial form of address seekingnew models and political cultures.

The rise of Islamic radiealism throughout the MiddleEast, and the incipient revolution that explodedwith the overthrow of the Shah Reza Pahlavi and thePeacock Throne in Iran, and with it, the sacking andoccupation of the American embassy in Teheran byuniversity students, unleashed a radical postcoloni­al force that is distinct from the forces of decolonisa­tion in the 1950S and 1960s. The overthrow ofthe Shahnot only revived political Islam, it placed it at the cen­tre of global discursive formations in which it has re­mained since tbe founding of Al-Qaeda in tbe 1990S.Thougb political Islam was already weIl financed ­botb ideologically and intellectually witb tbe forma­tion oftbe Muslim Brotberhood by Hassan Al-Bana inEgypt in tbe 1920S, and its intellectual transformationby its chief ideologue Sayyid Qutb - the first demon­stration of political Islam's will to globality was tbetheocratie organisation of its power in Iran in 1979.36

The Islamie revolution in Iran signalled tbe changedcontext of superpower politics or, pace Mbembe, ne­cropolitics. It not only introduced a new actor on theideologicallandscape - an actor wbo decides on thelimits oflife and controls and mobilises the organisa­tions of death - it also imagined a new politieal com­munity separate from and permanently antagonis­tie to structures ofpower and infrastructures of forcespecific to supermodernity. As such, the early 1980sinaugurated a remarkable cultural and political shiftin global terms.

The signal event ofthis historical shift was the returnof Ayatollab Ruhollah Khomeini to Teheran from ex­ile in Paris after the triumph ofthe resistance againstthe Shah. As the spiritual leader ofthe Islamic theoc­racy that has governed Iran to date, Khomeini presid­ed over the radieal ideological repositioning of Iranaway from the epistemologieal and cultural domi­nance of the West to Islamic ethics, not only as a sys­tem of governance but as a worldview based on theKoran as the supreme tool of religious, political, cul­tural, social and economie conduct and identity.The revolution in Iran was not just an act of insur­rection against supermodernity, attacking the dom­inant assumptions of imperialism that accompanyit; the revolution posited itself as an instrument ofspiritual and therefore social and cultural purifica­tion from the stain ofWestern, godless decadence. Inthe end the revolution, though political in the pe­destrian sense, was in fact, about culture and iden­tity: Islamic modernity as a counter-model and real

NAVIN RAWANCHAIKUL i8 a Thai artist who divides his time be­tween Thailand and Japan, and whose famiLy roots are Indian andHindu-Punjabi. Far the Altermodern Prologue he showed Navins0/ Bollywood 2006, which borrows from Bollywood song and dancecinema. and i8 part of the artist's ongoing investigation into identitythrough bis gLobal search for ather 'Navins'.

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Mrica proper, as far as History goes back,has remained - for all purposes of con­nection with the rest of the world - shut

up; it is the Gold landcompressed within it­seH - the land of child­hood, which lyingbeyond the day of self­conscious history, isenveloped in the darkmantle of Night. Its iso­lated character orig­inated, not merely inits tropical nature, butessentially in its geo­graphical condition.38

If Mrica is no part of histor­ical consciousness, therebylacking 'Spirit: how can it lay

claim to any experience of modernity if not from aneducation derived from the master narrative ofgrandmodernity? If the Muslim world is speciously modernand Mrica not yet modern, then the two societies ex­ist in anti-rational systems of theocratic fundamen­talism or tribai ethnocentrism. Each of these socie­ties is reduced to cultural spheres whose experienceof modernity have been developed out of oppressionand violence and therefore in need of reconciling tomodernity. However, Islamic societies tend to farebetter than Mrican ones in debates around moder­nity. Mrica is a zone which many reflexively and cat­egorically declare as the antithesis of the modern im­agination, a place ofthe absence ofmodernity, whereevery aspect ofthe conditions ofliving specific to mo­dernity has been effaced or erased. By this thinking,Mrica is the true epigone of modernity. If Bourriaudposits the entire structure ofhis project as altermod­ernist, Mrica, it may be said, at the very least is ajter­modern not only because the narratives of modernityin Mrica are predicated on an encounter of antago­nism but also in the invention of a new Mrican char-

Latour's idea that the world has never been modern.37

Mrica shares part ofthe scorn about its non-moder­nity that is also directed at the Muslim world. ButIslamic societies do enjoy greater respect than Mrica,because, there is a classical Islamic past which Mricais said to lack. German philosopher G.VY.F. Hegelmade this explicit, when he wrote:

D. AFTERMODERN

SO FAR, WE HAVE ADDRESSED the three dominant ide­as of current thinking about modernity. The fourthidea concerns an area of the world - Mrica - seen tobe the most opaque to the persuasions of supermo­dernity. Mrica is located in the nethermost part ofmodernity, relegated to an epistemology ofnon-exist­ence that has never been modern, to literalise Bruno

alternative to supermodernity. This position of politi­cal Islam is in remarkable accord with the idea ofthealtermodern.

Thus, the test for the power of persuasion of super­modernity can be partly analysed through the san­guine postcoloniallessons of the Islamic revolutionand the various struggles - for better or worse - thathave been undertaken by social and political forcesradicalised by their resentment of the machinationsof the West in Muslim societies. Structuring this rad­icalisation, and all the splin­tered cultural ideas and ide­ologies that rise from it, isthe collision of two irrecon­cilable positions: on the onehand a Western ethnocentricexceptionalism that contin­ues to prescribe a civilisingethos for the Muslim world,and on the other, an Islamicfundamentalism that merci­lessly attacks the West andits allies with nihilistic vio­lence. This meeting is a col­lision of political forces andculturallogics, an altermod­ernist relation marked by aface-off between colonial modernity and postcolo­nial modernity. However, the distance between co­lonial modernity and postcolonial modernity isone of degrees, for each incorporates and contra­dicts the other. Each is the mirror of the other. Theirstrained interpretation of the other is what hasproduced the kind of cultural antagonism that cur­rently bedevils Western and postcolonial discursiveformations, further enervating the competing insti­tutional structures, epistemology, ideals, faith andidentity.

odern.31

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aeter of modernity that emerges after the end of mo­dernity. The modernity to whieh Mriea responds, andwhieh it struggles to disaggregate from its social eon­text, is the arehiteeture of eolonial modernity. It is inthis sense that situations of modernity in Mriea areaftermodern, beeause, having no relation to history­making, its modernity ean only emerge after the endof the modern. Such modernity, more than in oth­er parts of world, would be based in large part on aprojeet of disinheriting the violenee of eolonial mo­dernity.

This is partly what the reeent images produeed bySouth Afriean photographer Guy Tillim seem to sug­gest: thatparts ofMriea - Congo, Angola, Madagasear,Ghana and Mozambique - have undertaken ineon­dusive projects of modernisation. Tillim's photo­graphs depict processes of anomie. Viewed througha eonventional lens, these images tend to eonveyand confirm the idea that modernisation has beenmarked by failure in Mriea. To a large extent, the im­ages are produets of a eertain ethnography of moder­nity, in the same way that my pereeption ofEuropeancities evokes the speetral nature of a museum of pet­rified modernity.

Tillim has been photographing in Mriea for morethan a deeade now. His images ean be superficiallydeseribed as reportage, a mode ofphotographie pro­duction that ean either oversimpHfy eomplex situa­tions or may illuminate aspeets of such situations asworthy of examination. Working with the verve ofa photojournalist and an aid worker, over the yearsTillim has earefully inserted hirnself and his eamerainto spaees that would normally be off-bounds formost photographers. He has made various Mrieancities the haunt of his photographie enterprise, forinstanee photographing over aperiod of six monthsin the tough tenements of Johannesburg, in mod­ernist buildings that have entered astate of ruin asthe urban eontext of the post-apartheid city beeamereplaeed by a sense of siege. Likewise, TilHm hasroamed all over Mriea, to various regions of eonfliet,searehing or, as some would say, seavenging for imag­es of societies in near-eollapse. On first eneounteringmany of Tillinis images, the tendeney is to view hisphotographs as the work of a zealous sensationalistor an ethnographer inseribing fantasies ofvisual fris­son against,the backdrop of social eollapse.

The reeent series of work by Tillim, like his Jo'burgseries, initially gave me pause, but looking more eare­fully at the seleetion of seenes and the organisationof the larger eompendium, the logie of his approachrevealed a study of eontrasts between posteolonialstate failure in Mriea and the notion of a eontinentin the throes of entering aftermodernity. To my mindit is in the interseetion between these eontrasts, thepromise and failure of deeolonisation, and the slowproeess of a eounter-modernity that is about to takeroot in Afriea. Tillim summarises this vision of a yetto eome modernity, writing about his images:

These photographs are not eollapsed his­tories of post-eolonial Afriean states or ameditation on aspeets of late modernisteraeolonial struetures, but a walkthroughavenues of dreams. Patriee Lumumba'sdream, his nationaHsm, is diseernible inthe struetures, if one reads the signs, asis the death ofhis dream, in these de fae­to monuments. How strange that mod­ernism, whieh esehewed monument andpast for nature and future, should earrysuch memory so well.39

Throughout different parts of Mriea new dis­courses and patterns of modernisation are not onlyrethinking the entire agenda whieh eolonial moder­nity bequeathed the eontinent, but social scientistsand researehers have also been articulating possi­ble theories for a type ofmodernity and a strueture ofmodernisation that ean take hold in Afriea. This mo·dernity, it is hoped, is one that will emerge at the endof the projeet of sapermodernity. It will perhaps marknot only an ideal of the altermodern, but will initiatea new eyde ofthe aftermodern.

Tillim sueeinetly artieulates that spirit of the yet-to­eome: 'In the frailty of this strange and beautiful hy­brid landscape struggling to eontain the ealamities ofthe past fifty years, there is an indisputably Mrieanidentity. This is my embraee of it:40 His photographieprojeet is an expression ofthe hope that showing thedeeaying legaey of eolonial modernity in Mriea is notan attempt to mourn the loss of some great past, buta possible tabala rasa for a future eomposition. It dis­arms and dispossesses the eolonial inheritanee, andshows, as Jürgen Habermas argues, that modernity isan ineomplete projeet.41

NOTES

1. NJALL FERGUSON, Empire: Ihe Rise undDemise 0/ the British World Order and (he Lessonsfor Global Power. New York 2004. In a subsequent,vork. NIALL FEROUSON, Colossus: The Price 0/American Empire. New York 20004. Ferguson actu­ally argues for an expanded American adaptationof the British model.

2.. DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, ProvincializingEurope: Posl-colonial 1hought and HistoriealDifference. 2nd ed.• Princeton 2007, p.x:vii.

3. These trips. totalling around l5 visits - 4 toChina and 11 to South Korea - took place betweenJune 2007 and early November 2008. They weremade while I worked in Gwangju, South Korea.as artistic directoc of Gwangju Biemrale. an eventfounded in 1995. in thewake ofSouth Korea's tran­sition to democracy in the 1990S. Tbe biennaleform, an exhibition model that eombines mas­sive seaIe with unabashed theatricality, is itselfa product of a certain idea of cuJtural modernitythat has made its way from the late nineteenthcentury in Eu rope to the explosion it presentLy en­joys alJ over the world, and more so in Asia in thetwenty-first century.

4. NICOLAI OUROUSSOPF, 'Lost in the NewBeijing: The Old Neighborhood', New York Times,27 July 2008; and 'In the Changing Face ofBeijing,a Look at the New China', New York Times. 13 July2008, In a cOIuparative analysis oE China andPersian Gulf eities like Dubai, Ouroussoff ex­plored how the idea of moderllisation on a mas­sive scale has shifted visionary architecture that.in the past. was largely vlewed sceptically by ar­chitects and was, for the most part, peripheralto new theories of urbanism. With the advent ofthese changes in China and in Dubai, Abu Dhabi,Bahrain and Doha, etc., the new frontier of urbanexperirnentation has moved to the East and de­clined in the West. See Ouroussoff, 'The New, NewCity', New York Times, 8June 2008.

5. In a commentary about the intention of thework. HUANG YONG PING says, 'In China, re­garding the two cultures of East and West. tra­ditional and modern, it is constantly being dis­cussed as to whieh is right, which is wrong, andhow to blend the two. In my opinion, placing thesetwo texts in the washing machine for two min­utes symbolises this situation and weil solves theproblem much more effectively and appropriatelythan debates lasting a hundrcd years: Quoted inGAO MINGLU, The Wall: Reshaping ContemporaryChinese Art, exh. cat., Albright Knox Art GaIIery,BuffaJo and Millennium Museum, Beijing 2005,p.129

6. DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, Habitations oJModernity: Essays in the Wake ofSubaltern Studies,Chicago 2002.

7. NICOLAS BOURRIAUD, published statementfrom a brochure outline for the 'Altermodern' pro­gram, Tate BritalD, London April 2008.

8. In 2001, the fi rst African Pavillon in the VeuiceBiennale in tbe exhibition Authentic/Exeentric.curated by Salah Hassan and Dlu Oguibe, arguedfor this sense or a dispersed zone of practice. Fora productive curatorial and critical explorationof the idea of tbe excentric nature of contempo­rary, see tbe accornpanying catalogue, SALAH

HAB SAN AND OLU OGUIBB (eds.), Authentie/beentrie: Coneeptualism in Conlemporary A/rieanArt, Ithaca 2001.

9. CHAKRABARTY2007, P.4.

1.0. BOURRIAUD :1008.

J.J.. EDOUAßD OLIBSANT, Poeties 0/ Relation.trans. BetseyWing, Ann Arbor 1996.

12. 'Ihe four artists in the exhibition: Ray Albano(Philippines), Redza Piyadasa (Malaysia), JirnSupangkat (Indonesia) and Apinan Poshanyanda(Thailand). All played multiple roles as influentialartists, curators. critics and historians in each oftheir individual national contexts in the develop­ment orthe discourses of modernity and contem­poraryart.

13. PATRICK D. FLORES. 'Turns in Tropics:Artist Cucator' in Okwui Enwezor (ed.), AnnualReport: A Year in ExhibiUorls. Gwangju2008, P.263.

1.4. SUNANDA K. SANYAL. 'TransgressingBorders. Shaping an Art Hi8tory: Rose Kirumiraand Makerere's Legacy' in Tobias Döring (ed.),AJrieun Cultures. Visuat Arts and the Museum:Sights/Sites o/Creativity and Conflict, Matatu, 25-6,Amsterdarn and New York 2002, PP.133-59.

1.5. ELIZABETH HARNEY, In Scnghor's Shadow:Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal,1960-1995 Durham 2004.

16. GEETA KAPUR, When Was Modernism:Essays Oll Contemporary ClIlturul Practiee in lndia,New Delhi 2000.

J..7. MINGLU 2005: and OAO MJNOLU, 1heEcology 01 Post·Cultural Revolution Frontier Art:Apartment Art in China, J970-J990S, Beijing 2008.

18. CHIKA OKEKE-AGULU, 'The Art Society audthe Maki ng orPostco}onial Modernism in Nigeria'.unpublished lecture, Princeton University, 2008,See also the remarkabJe study of the relationshipbetween negritude. postcoloniaLism and modern­ism in Harney 2004 and Gao Minglu 2005. Thesestudies are among a growing list of scholarshipdirected at excavaling the multi face ted historiesofmodern aud contemporary art across divergenthistorieal and cuJturaJ geograpbies. The studiesiIIuminate the basic fact that buried within offi­cial Western mainstream art history are cornplextendencies, narratives and structures ofpracticethat do not easily conform to the teleological con­struction ofmodern and contemporary art. Thesehistories, at the same time, reveal the diverse tem­poraJitles of modern art by showing that there isno single genealogy orartistic modernity or senseof innovation. Yet whatever lacunae these hi8to­ries inbabit, they do reveal modernity as aseriesoftrajectories moving in multiple directions, andthey are equally in fOl'med by culturaL ideologieal,formal and aesthetic logics.

19. KOBENA MERCER (ed,), CosmopolitanModernisms (2005); DiscrepantAbstraclion (2006);Pop Art und Vernacular Caltures (2007); aud Exiles.Diasporas and Strallgers (2008): Annotating Art'sHistories, London and Cambridge 2005-8.

20. See RASHEEN ARAEEN, 1he Other Story:Afro-Asian Artisls in Posl·War ßritain, exh. cat.,Hayward Gallery. London 1989. This landmark ex­hibition and its accompanying catalogue was oneof the earliest attempts to employ postcolonialand postmodern criLiques to examine the ins ti­tutional excJusions of the practices of artists whowere not deemed to properly belong within themainstream canon ofhistorical legitimation.

21. MICHEL FOUCAULT. 'Right of Death andPower Over Life', in Jhe Hislory 01 Sexuality: AnITltrodliction, trans. Rohert Hurley, I. New York

1990, PP.135-59.

22. GIORGJOAGAMBEN,HomerSaeer:SovereignPower and Bare Life. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen,Stanford 199B.

23. JU DITH BUTLER. Precarious Life: The Powers0/ Mourning and Violenee, London and New York2004·

24. ACHILLE MBEMBE, 'Necropolitics', trans.Libby Meinljes, Public Culture, vol.15, nO.1. Winter2003p.12,

25. Ibid., P.13.

26. Ibid., p.14.

27. lbid.. p.l).

28. FREDRJC JAMESON, A Singular Modernity:Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London andNewYork 2002.

29. SHMUEL N. EISENSTADT, 'MultipleModernities', in Daedalus, vol.129, nO.1, Winter2000, pp.1-29,

30. AMARTVA SEN, ldenlity and Viotence: ThelltUSiOHS ofDestiny, New York 2006.

31. BJÖRN W1T'rROCK, 'Early Modernities:Varieties aod Transitions', in Daedatll8, VOl.127,nO.3, Summer 1998, PP.19-40.

32. FERNAND BRAUDEL, 1he Mediterraneallund the Mediterranean World in the Age oJPhilJip11. trans. Sian Reynolds, Berkeley 1995: for a moreoverarching study of the historieal developmentin relation to modernity, see FERNAND BRAU­

DEL, A History of Civilizations, trans. RicbardMayne, London and NewYork 1993.

33. ARJUN APPADURAl,ModernityAILarge: 1heCullural Dimension 0/ Globalization, Minneapolis1996.

34. KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH, Cosmo­politanism: Ethics in a World oJStrangers. New York2007.

35. See JÖRGEN HABERMAS, The PhilosophieaLDiscourse 01 Modernity: Twelve Essays, trans.Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass. Ig87.

36. The Iranian revolution marked a shift fromthe modern poJitks of Gamel Abdel Nasser's pan­Arabism.

37. See BRUNO LATOUR, We Have Never BeenModern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge 1993.

38. G.W.F. HEGEL, 11le Philosophy 0/ Hislory.trans. J. Sibree, New York 1956, P.9t.

39. This is an excerpt from an email state­ment sent to tbe author by GUY TILLIM on 25September 2008.

40.1bid.

41. HABERMAB 19B7.